Follow me on Twitter

OSD – Using PowerShell Commands in UserExit VB script to extend the ZTIGather process during OSD

During todays session I realized that I have done a lot of OSD stuff, but never published it (shame on me), so time to work. First up is how to run PowerShell CommandLets inside a UserExit script. A UserExit script is an extension to the ZTIGather process, giving you the opportunity to extend the gather process with information that the Gather process does not cover. That has been possible for a long time, but VBscript is not really the easiest script language in the world, so I asked my self if it would be possible to use PowerShell inside the VBscript and of course it is!

The idea

The basic idea is to run the UserExit script from customsettings.ini as usual and then do a jump out into PowerShell, execute the PowerShell CMDLets, terminate and return the value into the VBscript, which then will be a value connected to a Custom Property in the gather process, which then can be consumed by customsettings.ini and/or the task sequence. you can download everything from here: http://1drv.ms/1u41Yj2

How-To

The Boot Image

The boot image must have support for PowerShell and you can get that by adding .NET and PowerShell

Lite Touch.

Zero Touch.

The Customsettings.ini file

The customsettings.ini file will direct ZTIGather to process the section called UserExits, which will execute the UserExit.vbs script, call the function called RunningPSCommand and return the value from that function into the property called PSCommand.

This is a sample of how the customsettings.ini file should look like to call the UserExit script.

The UserExit Script that runs PowerShell commands

The script is rather simple, basically the PowerShell command is a string, executed by PowerShell.exe and using Executor.StdIn.Close to close the window and then using Executor.StdOut.ReadAll to grab whatever you have in the window and put that in the RunningPSCommand, which then is returned back to the ZTIGather process as a value for the Property RunningPSCommand.

The result of running the ZTIGather

As you can see the PowerShell command was running and returned the value “Virtual Machine” and now the Property PSCommand is equal to Virtual Machine and can be used elsewhere in CustomSettings.ini or in the Task Sequence